question about virtualbox and windows.

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 10/24/2010 1:12 PM, Brandon Gooch wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Julian Elischer<julian at freebsd.org>  wrote:
>>
>> If I have a FreeBSD 8 machine with a windows partition that currently works.
>> is there a way to boot FreeBSD, start virtualbox and run windows from the
>> current
>> functional windows partition..
>> basically I want to switch over to using dual-boot on this machine to
>> permanently running BSD with windows as a VM when needed.
>>
>> Julian
>> (I did this many years ago with vmware 1.x but not since).
>>
>
> Though I've not tried any of the setups, there are several how-tos in
> the VirtualBox forums explaining how to do just that sort of thing:
>
> http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewforum.php?f=28
>
> I'm preparing to do essentially the same thing with several machines
> at work, so I've looked through the Windows 7 and XP instructions;
> doesn't seem too difficult, but good luck nevertheless...
>

Another "quick hack" way to do this is to run VMWare's converter

Then run

  qemu-img convert vmwareimage.vmdk  image.bin

VBoxManage convertdd  image.bin  image.vdi


Here's the ideas:

http://www.petri.co.il/virtual_convert_physical_machines_to_virtual_machines_with_vmware_converter_2.htm

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-convert-vmware-image-to-virtualbox-image.html

One thing about this if it works for you is the vmware converter takes
care of all the ickyness of substituting the vmware device drivers in
windows for the physical hardware drivers.

If you try the run-from-partition way although it can be made to work 
even the authors of this hack caution against using it long term

Ted

> -Brandon
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